The Ritual (21 page)

They sat in silence again, until Dom broke it. ‘Do you think anyone is happy?’

‘Never can tell.’

‘It’s like you said, it’s all about P.R. these days. Brand management. Social networking. The corporatization of our own experience. We’re all our very own communications directors. But what a load of bollocks it all is when you’re faced by something like this.’

‘Kind of levels the playing field.’

‘Sweeps all of that bullshit away. All that really matters is being able to survive. Some do it better than others.’

‘I guess.’

‘You do. You can do this.’

Luke did not know what to say.

‘Out here. You’re good out here. Better at this shit than me and Phil. Maybe Hutch too, for all his poncing with stoves and tents. You’ve still got that instinct.’

Was it a compliment?

‘Once Hutch was gone, me and Phil were fucked. We wouldn’t have got this far without you. For all the good it’s done us. But at least you got us closer to the end of these bastard trees.’

Luke snorted back a laugh. ‘It’s the other world I can’t cope with. I’m hopeless in it.’

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’

Luke nodded, sighed, but had always felt unable to take advice like that.

‘I don’t think any of us knew how to be happy,’ Dom said, his voice deeper than usual, wistful. ‘Maybe Hutch got it right. He kept it simple. Kept it real. Didn’t overextend himself. Picked a low-maintenance woman. Looked after himself. But the rest of us haven’t done so well, mate, when you look a bit more closely at the ledger. What me and Phil had is gone. All of it. We ended up a pair of fatties, about to be divorced, looking at the prospect of limited access to our kids. A couple of fat bastards who couldn’t even manage a walk in the woods.’

Luke laughed. And laughed until his face was warm and running with tears.

‘Eh?’ Dom continued, smiling through his own tears. ‘Phil married a nightmare too. That was his problem. Poor bastard. That bitch will get everything now. What she always wanted. Let’s hope she gets the debts too. But Gayle …’ He paused, and exhaled. When he spoke again his voice was almost a whisper. ‘She won’t be able to cope with this, and the kids too. That’s why I want to get out. I have to. I just have to. Her parents are too old. The nippers won’t get over …’ Dom cleared his throat. Blew air out with all the might of his lungs.

‘Now’s not the time, Domja. Keep it together. Big fat crying …’

They sat in silence again. Against Luke’s back, Dom’s body felt warmer.

Luke turned his head. ‘We’ll do it, mate. We’ll do it. Tomorrow. And take a word of your own advice, and don’t beat yourself up. Not now. Not here. I take my hat off to you guys. I do. I always have done. You’ve all done good.’ He paused. ‘What I said. The other night. Was bollocks. I was just transferring. Bad habit.’ He blew out a long tired sigh. ‘I always envied you guys. You know that?’

‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Dom said, then cleared his throat of emotion.

‘I’ve always been proud of you lot.’

‘And we’ve always been fascinated by what you were getting up to. At least you had a go. Did things a bit differently. Wanted something else.’

‘It came to nothing. That’s all I know.’

Dom shrugged, sighed. ‘We were all fairly monogamous guys. Got into relationships and stayed in them. Then kids. At least you got to throw the hump a few times.’

Luke smiled.

‘And we all went back to our home towns after uni. Stayed put. It made life easier, Luke. Things were cheaper when we all graduated. We got houses. Kept the same jobs, until recently. I’ve never done anything else but play it safe. And Phil. At least you and Hutch had a go at something else. That’s got to count for something? And nothing is really safe. Is it? None of us knew what life would throw at us. Everyone is fucked up, Luke. Damaged. We’re all messed up, underneath. Doesn’t matter what kind of house you live in.’

They sat in silence again for a while. In which Luke felt awkward and ashamed: after what he’d done to Dom, after what he had said, here was his friend, injured, cold and scared, but still trying to reassure him about his car-wreck of a life. If this wasn’t friendship, he didn’t know what was. ‘I had so much and never learned to appreciate it. And I know now I’ve never even been tested. Not properly. Until now. Have just handicapped myself and bitched about it.’

But now it was time for him to make his mark. To step up. To get them both out of here. If he could pull it off, it would be the only useful thing he’d ever really achieved. Nothing mattered more than life and death.

Now they were together, sitting against each other, the very contact of their shoulders pressed together informed him there was no way on earth he could leave Dom alone. Not tonight. Not in the morning. Not out here. The very thought of walking away from the tent with Dom still beside it was unbearable. He imagined looking back at the tent, abandoned on this hill. And he imagined what would come out of the trees and go up there to find his friend. To finish him.

They were thinking about the same thing, again, because Dom suddenly said, ‘You better take off.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I mean it. The one thing in our favour this far north, that we haven’t used to our advantage because I’ve been slowing us down all day, every day, is the longer evenings. You could make it out tonight if you put your foot down.’

Luke shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Don’t be an arse. It’s your only chance. My leg is finished. I can’t bend it at all now. How far could I get tomorrow? Dragging it. Stumbling all over the bloody place with that stick. Not very far, that’s how far. So get out of here and get help. I mean it, Luke. I’m not messing around. People have to know what happened here.’

‘I can’t.’ His voice sounded pitiful, tiny, in the cold watery air, before the rock and wood that would not be defied in its almighty and far-reaching indifference, its immensity of permanence.

‘What use can I be?’ Dom’s voice softened, but was older somehow. Luke had never heard this tone from him before; the voice of a father, of a man. ‘It was different when there were three of us. Now, it’s all changed. You’ve got to give yourself a chance. I would. If that makes it easier for you. If the situation was reversed, and you were hurt, I would have gone already. Staying with me is a death sentence.’

Luke dropped his face into his hands, clawed at his cheeks. He’d never felt so wretched in his life. His eyes screwed up and he wanted to cry.

Dom lowered his voice to a whisper. He stretched an arm behind him and he gripped Luke’s bicep with his broad fingers. Squeezed it. ‘Please. Go. It’s coming for me next anyway. You can’t keep an eye on me and where you’re putting your feet. It’s not possible. You did your best, but it’s not an option now. It’ll take us both out. First me when your back is turned. Then you. I couldn’t even clear this forest if I put everything into it tomorrow. So it would mean another night after this one. You know it.’

Luke tried to keep the emotion out of his voice, but could not. ‘Fuck it. Dom. Fuck it.’ He swallowed. ‘I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t. But we leave here together. Tomorrow. In the morning. Your pace. We walk. Rest. Walk. Watch each other’s backs. We leave all the stuff here beside the sleeping bags. We do it together, or not at all.’

Dom’s fingers squeezed his arm tighter. He was crying and trying to stifle it, but failing and getting angry with himself. ‘Shit.’

‘It’s OK. OK.’

Dom growled and cleared his throat. ‘I had it all worked out. Now you’ve fucking ruined it.’

They both sniffed; it was the closest thing to laughter they could manage.

Dom cleared his throat. ‘Now you’ve given me hope again.’

Luke reached backwards and gripped Dom’s shoulder.

And from the foot of the hill, no more than twenty metres below them, as if rising to a new challenge, a long and terrible sound grew from a hidden mouth and made the hill, and every square foot of land for miles around, tremble from its bellow.

FORTY

A flock of birds heaved themselves into the sky, accelerated, swooped to the south; frantic to put distance between themselves and the sound of what now moved over the face of the earth. It was right below their position on the hill, moving through the trees on the south side, its footfalls silent.

Changing from grey to an Atlantic blue-black, the sky sucked the pitiful remains of the sun’s distant glow up and into itself, dissolving visibility to vague shapes of trees and silhouettes of rock with black swathes of the indefinable between. Spaces that could be redefined by frantic minds to resemble anything at all.

Dom never stood up. His face blanched under the filth to make his scabbed lips appear dark as if stained by wine. His wide eyes were filled with madness. It was impossible to speak in the gravity of terror that crushed them both against the rocks and made Luke’s left leg shake uncontrollably. He was standing, but only just, and watching the rim of the hillock from where the sound had originated, expecting a long shape to rise at any moment.

He could not breathe, like the surface of his lungs were adhered together, and around his mind swiftly spun idiot words, and quick flashes of the shattered, mottled remains in that wet cavity beneath the derelict church.

Within the pit of his belly he tried to find the heat of anger; the rage that made him go to meet it face-to-face when they found poor Hutch, disembowelled and splashing his innards down his legs and onto the black bark of the hanging trees. But there was nothing inside him but a chaotic space with no room for anything beside the kind of terror that could disengage a mind from anything but imbecilic musings.

And then again, to their left, so suddenly at their side, the bellow opened up the damp and boggy forest that remembered prehistory within its depths of peaty soil and in every single stone. Bestial grunting gave way to a devilish yipping in which words could almost be understood.

From the very core of each of them, their ancestors seemed to cry out in inarticulate voices. Right then, they screamed in alarm from times before symbols and language could depict such things that hunted and meant murder. Luke believed they were returned, in this cold and in this dark, to a place and into the presence of something from earth’s dawn. Or another, even older place than that.
It
dominated the land. The boughs and leaves of its territory shuddered, marshy surfaces quivered, and the dank and dripping vales held their breath before its arrival.

Luke walked towards the sound, to the eastern edge of the hill on which they were about to make their final stand. Or maybe an engagement with it would be nothing more than it taking twitching sacrifices from the summit. Snatching with a swiftness and euphoria that comes to the predator whose hot sinuses and moist valves inflame with the scent of warm flesh and gushing salty blood.

Luke imagined a sinewy darkness, depressed to the earth. Moving through the shadows, up and over and under things. The very obstacles that banged their shins or brought them gasping to a standstill, it merely glided past, able to slip through any natural barrier. Every inch of ground must have been mapped with nostril and tongue for years.

He held the knife against his side, and told himself there would be one strike in him. And he must make it instinct-fast. Rapid as a blink. Quicker than a flinch. At the exact moment it came whipping for his throat, or spearing at his torso. One strike, one chance.

Nearing the edge of the hill, Luke dropped to a crouch and raised his left forearm in the way police dog-handlers do. The hand holding the knife clenched white and readied itself for an upper cut.

Then he turned more quickly than conscious decisions or explanations would allow for, and ran back to where Dom sat prone and watching him. Ran with great jumping strides beyond balance or thought of where his feet fell; ran as fast as he could at Dom, at the tent, the knife ready.

And sure enough, just as the tips of the hairs on the nape of his neck had whispered, and as the tiny vibrations in his inner ear bones had trilled, and as the cooling of the blood through his heart warned, it would come in through the back door. Quick and low after luring one of them out to see it.

Behind the tent, pebbles were disturbed and scattered. There was a snort, as if from a bullock, and then Luke received a sense of a dark shape dropping and melting swiftly away, like the passing shadow of a cloud moving beneath the sun. Obscured by the loose tent and the spruce tree, he imagined, more than he saw, a long, black, nimble presence vanishing down the southern slope of the hill, as fluid as water.

Luke stopped in a skittering, lurching scramble over the lichen-covered boulders behind the tent, violently expelling his breath in a gust that ended in a cry when he plunged into the miasma something inhuman had left upon the summit. He gathered himself in the very place where it had just been, where it had craned forward to snatch Dom as he sat before the tent, looking the wrong way. Downwind of him.

‘Clever bastard.’

Which was why Dom had not detected the heavy animal spore of a coat wet and fouled and ungroomed, or the hot meaty stench of a large mouth, and the livestock reek of air silently exhaled through a great muzzle.

At the edge of the hill, Luke looked down to the distant southern treeline. Nothing. There was nothing there at all any more.

‘What? Where is it?’ Dom whispered, his voice so tight and high it was unrecognizable.

‘Gone. Down there.’ Luke glanced over his shoulder and across the roof of the tent. ‘Look to your front!’

‘What?’

‘To the front!’ Luke bounded back to where Dom sat, staring up at him, terrified and bemused.

Luke scanned the rocky plateau, the edges of the summit, to the west and the north. Nothing.

He shook his head and bent over, hands on thighs, gulping at the dusky air. ‘Jesus.’

‘What? Where is it?’

Luke looked at Dom. ‘It drew me out. Made me follow the sounds. But it doesn’t come from there. But from behind you when you’re looking in the wrong direction. It was behind the tent.’